“... Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the ...”

“... England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins and significance of the legend, but also materially ...”

“... his marriage in 1883 to Taytu Betul, which gave him the support of her influential kinsmen in the north. The acquisition in 1887 of the city of Harar, situated 300 miles east of Addis Ababa and formerly controlled by the Egyptians, finally provided Menelik with access to the coast and shifted the balance of power within the empire decisively towards his ...”

“... spoken in Normandy and Picardy, which came over with England’s conquerors. These regions were north of the Joret line, named after the 19th-century French linguist Charles Joret, and maintained a set of regional peculiarities that continue to echo in English today. Terms like ‘prey’ and ‘veil’ preserved ‘Normano-Picard’ vowel patterns rather ...”

“... I’ve always associated the event with Napoleon.’ Suzy finally lands up in Ulysses Road, North London, co-habiting with another of Fran’s cast-off lovers, Jeremy, a Courtauld postgraduate. She gets pregnant (astonished by the fact that she should matter enough to be fertile) and they marry. But it doesn’t work. He batters her, she leaves with her ...”

“... summer 1853, as Clarke guesses, he was walking with Millais on a ‘beautiful moonlit night’ in North London when the young men were astonished by the vision of a ‘young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes’. She paused for a moment ‘in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on ...”

“... of it, the side that makes Emmeline involve herself and her lover in a fatal accident on the Great North Road. And it is this dissolution into the primeval and inarticulate (she herself had a convulsive and never-conquered stammer) which ‘loosens the text’ for the modern theorist, ‘so that words and figural processes induce a hallucinatory logic ...”

“... more eye-catching than that left behind him by ‘Thompson of Sunderland’, a vandal out of the North who had scrawled his name and address on Pompey’s column in Alexandria in letters that Flaubert claims could be read ‘a quarter of a league away’. More significantly stupid than Thompson of Sunderland, however, was Auguste Comte, one of whose books ...”

“... alone, and liaise with my opposite numbers in Paris, Copenhagen and Stockholm, as well as in North America, Australia and Japan, where the anti-war youth movement was particularly strong. We were most wary of Nato’s Visiting Forces Act, which mandated police forces to ‘detain and arrest’ absentees. Although Harold Wilson’s government winked at ...”

“... as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were stationed at Aballava at the west end of Hadrian’s Wall, near the Solway Firth. In the fourth century a number of people with ...”

“... Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John F. Kennedy. Until recently he was a co-editor of Dissent, which prides itself on being the nation’s oldest democratic socialist magazine. His previous books include The Populist Persuasion (1995), an illuminating analysis which predated the recent ...”

“... Frankfurt and part of Hesse-Darmstadt were all annexed by Prussia, and the remaining German states north of the River Main incorporated into a Prussian-dominated North German Confederation with a constitution drawn up at Bismarck’s instigation. In the south, only four independent German states ...”

“... leadership of Artorius Castus, their enemies later being misunderstood as not Caledonians from the north, but Saxons from the east? The first supposition is highly unlikely, the second even more so. There is ‘not a shred of evidence for it’, Higham reports. (It becomes one of his favourite phrases.)The Sarmatian theory was taken up in Antoine Fuqua’s ...”

“... and other towns must be asked their opinion’ before London makes any decisions. In Gaskell’s North and South, it’s only when the spectre of centralisation is raised that the sturdily ineloquent mill-owner Mr Thornton can rise to the rhetorical level of Margaret Hale: I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it ...”

“... What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy ...”